Fearful Passenger Wears Mask at the Airport. Photo: 1MoreCreative (Getty)
Unless you were on a plane the morning after Cinco de Mayo, this is going to be appalling to even the most frequent of air travellers. According to The Sun, the decrease in cabin pressure while you fly leads to an increase in the number of farting passengers. How much “fart” is actually floating through the air on an average flight is quite shocking.
On a flight to New Zealand, a clinical professor at the University of Copenhagen noticed his stomach had bloated. He looked down at his water bottle and saw it had also expanded. A little number crunching and further research led to Jacob Rosenberg coming up with an approximation of just how much a traveller’s stomach expands on planes.
“The pressure drops and the air must expand into more space,” Rosenberg said. “The gas sitting inside the stomach then expands by 30 percent, and it needs to go somewhere.”
Time to cue the flatulence.
Just how much farting goes down on a plane? Well, when you take into consideration that the average person “lets out 0.5 to 1.5 liters of fart” each day, as well as Rosenberg’s 30 percent factor, it’s a lot of ass dropping, kids.
Well, farts: Judge In Australia Rules Boss ‘Farting On Employee’ Isn’t Bullying
From The Sun:
For instance, British Airways uses the Airbus 380 – which seats 525 – to fly from London to Singapore. In 13 hours, your average human would let out 0.54 liters of farts- with the added cabin pressure that goes up to 0.7 liters. If you times that by 525 passengers, that means the cabin would collect 368 liters of fart in the air across 550 square meters of cabin space – this would be halved because of air filtering to 184 liters. The same plane travelling from London to Miami – a 10-hour trip – would have 284 liters of fart in the air – halved because of air filtering to 142 liters.
Of course, all of those numbers are probably tripled if you’re flying out of an airport with a Taco Bell in the food court.
